Letters to the editor

Friday, January 18, 2013 - 12:15 pm

Adopted girl from foster care thinks life is a better choice

My husband and I have adopted a sibling set of six from foster care. Our oldest daughter who is 13 recently asked me about abortion, and I explained that it is when a child is killed before they are born.

“Why would people do that?” she asked. I explained that some women may feel that they aren’t able to take care of the child. And then my daughter, who has spent most of her life in foster care and experienced things that children should never have to, said this: “But it’s better to be given a chance to live than just to be killed before you’re born.”

How many of us can argue with someone who has lived through hell and still values her life greatly? Pro-abortionists may say, “This is just one girl’s perspective. An exception to many children who feel unloved and unwanted.”

At what point did you become God and get to decide whose life has value and whose doesn’t? Ask the millions of adoptive families in our country, and I think you will find more than one exception.

This January is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Since abortion was legalized, more than 55 million babies have been slaughtered in the United States. Our family’s prayer is that we will see an end to abortion in this country very soon and that Roe v. Wade will not survive to kill another generation.

Jody Rediger

The damage started with Milton Friedman

According to Public Policy Polling on Jan. 8, Congress, with a 9 percent approval rating, currently rates below cockroaches. In fact, one man is responsible for this — and he never served in Congress.

Bruce Bartlett analyzed the Republican minority status in the late 1970s.

Applying the thinking of Marx, Bartlett described the tension between Democrat and Republican as thesis and antithesis. The (Democrat) thesis was ever-increasing government spending. The (Republican) antithesis was the balanced budget.

Problem: The synthesis was also ever-increasing government spending. Bartlett concluded that the Republicans had to change their antithesis if they wanted to return to power.

The damage started with Milton Friedman, who said, “I would far rather have total spending at $200 billion with a $100 billion deficit than a balanced budget at $500 billion.” Friedman thus declared that the deficits were harmless and the true evil was government spending. This gave the intellectual green light to the Republicans to blow the roof off of the deficit with “supply-side economics.”

The theory was that if we “starved the beast” with low taxes, then the public would demand cuts to government spending — the true evil. It never worked. There was little demand to cut spending, since the public wanted the programs. The profound error the supply-siders were committing all along was assuming that if we give out government for free, people will demand less of it.

The Friedman sanctioning of deficits undermined the functioning of the American political system by breaking a feedback loop from the public to elected officials. If the spending ever got too high (while being fully paid for with taxes), then the overtaxed public would demand spending reduction. But Republican anti-tax fanaticism now prevented the taxes from going up to pay for the government the public voted for. The Republicans dished out something for nothing. This is why we are $16 trillion in the hole.

Friedman was not a supply-sider, but his anti-government, anti-tax fanaticism has dominated the Republican Party since the 1980s and is responsible for piling trillions of dollars of debt onto young Americans. Friedman profoundly altered the functioning of the American political system by declaring deficits harmless. His legacy is that the primary obstacle to repairing our country's economy and finances is the irresponsible anti-tax fanaticism of the Republican leadership.